Sunday, July 02, 2017

The Lebanese are mostly Phoenician

The latest study led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and in collaboration with universities from around the world, including Lebanon, Switzerland, and New Zealand, proves that most of the Lebanese ancestry is Phoenician.

In fact, they argue that the links go further back to the Canaanites, the historic and biblical people – who include the Phoenician people.

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This is not a surprising result, but genetic studies are still important even when they tell us what we thought we already knew. And this one also told us that there were Eurasians in Lebanon in antiquity, which we might have guessed, but now we know.

Researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany, have decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected results.

Publishing its findings in Nature Communications, the study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.

Modern Egyptians, by comparison, share much more DNA with sub-Saharan populations.

The findings have turned years of theory on its head, causing Egyptologists to re-evaluate the region's history while unlocking new tools for scientists working in the field.

For past posts on Phoenician and Jewish DNA studies, see here and links.

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